What is the crowd's opinion of checksum?

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/u/eriksrx, /u/SiberianLannister, /u/Corsaer:

If you have data in long term storage, you need to use Multipar to repair the gradual data corruption that occurs (and stay away from multipar.eu):

• MultiPar - BEWARE: multipar.eu is a malicious spam site with altered versions of MultiPar.

For routine verification, I use Corz Checksum with a 1-file root checksum because it's ridiculously fast. Then I make the par data set with 10% redundancy in Multipar that includes the hash file, so errors in the hash file can be corrected too:

• checksum for Windows.. BLAKE2, SHA1 or MD5 hash a file, a folder, or a whole drive/volume, with an Explorer right-click.

Whenever I want to verify my data, I use Corz Checksum. If errors are found, then I use Multipar to correct them.

0xFFFFF825

I was getting this error every time I tried to install a game. Tl;dr: the issue was that files were being corrupted when copying to my SD card (bad SD->USB adapter?)

Troubleshooting:
So I'd copy a game over and try to install to USB. I'd do it multiple times back-to-back and it would fail at the same percentage done. I'd recopy the all files and it would then fail at a different percentage. I'd use different SD cards and different USB drives, and it'd always fail consistently at a certain percentage until I recopied the files or changed SD cards.

The 'fix':
I used a program called "checksum" to take hashes of all the files for each game I downloaded from NUSGrabber. Then, after copying the files to the SD, I'd take hashes on those copied files. Any file hashes on the SD that didn't match the files downloaded from NUSGrabber, I would recopy. Once all the hashes matched, I had no issue installing any games.

Edit: Seems I misunderstood the reason for this thread. Well, either way, hopefully this helps anyone else running into the same error.

http://corz.org/windows/software/checksum/

Should be easy to automate since it pretty much just shuts up and does the work on it's own. Author seems a weird bird - but his code works well.

You might also consider storing folders or groups of files as rar 5.0 archives with Blake 2 file hashes, reed solomon error correction & possibly encryption. The store function is handy - we rarely compress rar archives. Rar is there only to gather and protect. rar is cross platform.

Store your folders like this and they are essentially immutable.

I have made 5 bug reports:

https://www.reddit.com/r/bugs/search?q=author%3Abadon_&restrict_sr=on

Of those 5 bug reports, 2 of them were fixed within a few hours on the same day I reported them. The other 3 are not even a week old yet. I'm a very experienced bug reporter, and I can say with complete confidence that Reddit's treatment of bug reports and the people who reported them is far above average. Off the top of my head, I can't think of any other organization of this size who is as good as Reddit is at handling bug reports.

Oh, I forgot to mention my second fixed bug report earned my first Reddit Gold, when the person handling the bug sent it to me! I can only remember being rewarded for a bug report one other time, by the person that made Corz Checksum. If you check my mediawiki.org user page, you will see some truly impressive horror stories:

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Badon

There are so many, that page is almost turning into a blog about bug hunter hate.

Even though I disagree with you, I'm still upvoting this post to draw attention to how great Reddit has been about fixing bug reports and treating the bug reporters well.

Thanks fo reply. I'm using storage spaces with REFS for most important data, but something for single disk will be nice.

Corz ( http://corz.org/windows/software/checksum/) look interesting, thanks.

I'm primarily a Windows user, so I use this software to generate MD5 hashes:

http://corz.org/windows/software/checksum/

ATM I maintain an original and two offline backups, and run a verify process every couple of months to make sure there's been no bit rot or other issues.

(This is not as good using something like ZFS, but fits my budget and space limitations at the moment).

http://corz.org/windows/software/checksum/

checksum can create (two clicks, or a drag-and-drop) or verify (one click) hashes of a file, a folder, even a whole disk full of files and folders in one simple, no-nonsense, high-performance operation.

ViceVersa is the best backup software I have found, specifically because it does a great job of exactly the use case you have. It will automatically detect when files change, back them up, and timestamp or "archive" all versions. It's very powerful, but the company doesn't respond well to bug reports, and they don't even allow screenshots to be posted on their forum. Fortunately, you have to push the software hard to like I do to find a bug, because it's very polished. I don't pay for much of my software, but ViceVersa is worth every penny:

http://www.tgrmn.com/

Backup is useless without data integrity checks, and ViceVersa is one of the few that can at least do a checksum to verify the file was copied correctly. I won't even bother with backup software that can't do a simple checksum. That rules out all but maybe 5 or 6 of them. Get MultiPar and Corz Checksum too, they're handy.

Get the latest version of MultiPar here:

https://www.livebusinesschat.com/smf/index.php?board=396.0

Corz Checksum here:

http://corz.org/windows/software/checksum/

You can select verify when burning, but since you have already done that, you could run an MD5 hasher on the disk vs the mounted iso...or you could use something like TreeSize free to look at folder sizes and just compare the size. Use the MD5 hash if you are concerned with the integrity of the data.

Here is a link I found for a hasher.